(Bloomberg) — Meta Platforms is deploying a brand new homegrown chip to assist energy its synthetic intelligence providers, aiming to lower its reliance on semiconductors from Nvidia Company and different exterior firms.
The chip, introduced Wednesday, is the newest model of the Meta Coaching and Inference Accelerator, or MTIA, which helps rank and advocate content material throughout Fb and Instagram. Meta launched the primary MTIA product final 12 months.
Meta’s pivot to AI providers has introduced elevated demand for computing energy. Final 12 months, the social media large launched its personal model of an AI mannequin to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. It additionally added new generative AI options to its social apps, together with custom-made stickers and celebrity-faced chatbot characters.
In October, the corporate stated it might spend as a lot as $35 billion on infrastructure to assist AI, together with information facilities and {hardware}. “AI will probably be our greatest funding space in 2024,” Chief Government Officer Mark Zuckerberg informed traders that month.
A major quantity of that spending will seemingly nonetheless stream to Nvidia, which builds the favored H100 graphics playing cards that energy AI fashions. Earlier this 12 months, Zuckerberg stated the corporate would purchase 350,000 of these chips, which price tens of 1000’s of {dollars} every.
However there’s a rising motion amongst tech giants to develop chips in-house. Meta is becoming a member of rivals Amazon.com Inc.’s AWS, Microsoft Company and Alphabet’s Google in making an attempt to wean themselves off a really costly dependency. It received’t be a fast repair, although. To this point, the efforts haven’t made a dent within the business’s insatiable want for Nvidia’s AI accelerators.
The AI increase has helped flip Nvidia into the world’s third-most-valuable tech firm, behind solely Microsoft and Apple. Its gross sales to information middle operators totaled $47.5 billion in fiscal 2024, up from simply $15 billion the 12 months earlier than. Analysts predict that the sum will greater than double once more in fiscal 2025.
